down in Long Beach. The cover was black with one little dim light, a candle, a hand cupped around it. It was from the week in July of the New York City blackout. He turned over the pages, stepped in. Here was another time capsule, images of 1977, the worries and frivolities of the day. Watergate hearings were grinding on. Miss America Phyllis George married producer Robert Evans “under a four-hundred-year-old sycamore” in Beverly Hills. War between Ethiopia and Somalia. The Sex Pistols arrived in America, in New York, sneering in their Wild One black leather jackets, looking scary and silly, like something New Yorkers had found when the lights came back on.

The story on the murders was halfway through. This was just the kind of California story the East Coast loved. There were pictures of the house front and back and a smiling Elaine Kantke and a half-smiling Jack Kantke and a potato-faced Bill Danko.

The picture of Danko was a mugshot.

The overline read:

LA DOLCE VITA, RIVO ALTO STYLE

“Did I wake you?”

It was a hot night and Jean Kantke had the lights off. She wore a sports bra and three-stripe Adidas silks. She was in the living room in her apartment, the penthouse of a four-story building on a curving street in the hills above Sunset, above the Strip. She pushed aside the sliding glass doors—the apartment had a fifties feel to it—and walked out onto the deck with the portable phone. It was a killer view, the Strip below, the orange and yellow lights of the city stretching all the way down to Compton.

“I never know when people sleep,” Jimmy continued. “I mean, regular people.”

“Is that what I am?” Jean said into the phone.

“You have a job,” Jimmy said. “An office. Hours.”

She stepped to the south end of the wraparound terrace, went to the railing. It wasn’t that late, a little before midnight. She could hear laughter every once in a while from the open-air cafés on the boulevard with their tables on the sidewalks.

“Are you alone?” she said.

“Yeah.”

“I thought I heard something.”

“I’m in the car,” he said.

Jimmy was headed east on Sunset, past restaurants and bars with limos stacked up, even on a Monday. He’d lost the tails. They weren’t around when he came out of Canter’s. Or maybe they’d gotten better. He kind of missed them. The light ahead turned yellow. He gunned the Mustang and it leapt forward.

He turned left onto Miller Drive, up into Sunset Plaza, a neighborhood of houses and apartment buildings built like steps up the hills. Modest entrances, pricey vistas. On a quiet side street he parked in the shadows, turned off the engine.

He got out with his phone, leaned against the fender. There were old-fashioned bulbous streetlights on Corinthian stalks, white light, not the crime-fighter orange that colored most of L.A. Three or four houses up the hill, a dog nosed around a trashcan, looked in his direction, then plopped down in the middle of the street.

Jean looked south toward Long Beach, miles and years away.

“Was it cooler down there?” she said.

“Not much.”

“At least it’s clear.”

She was full of longing, vague, undefined. She wondered if he could hear it in her voice.

“The house is empty,” Jimmy said. “It looks like nobody’s touched it since the murders. Inside, anyway. Is that possible?”

There was a hollow wind down the line a second or two.

“People keep telling me anything is possible,” Jean said.

She had a water somewhere. She went looking for it, into the living room, then on into the kitchen.

“What do you know about The Jolly Girls?” Jimmy said.

“They were just Mother’s friends,” Jean said. “The papers made a lot out of it. They all covered for each other. That’s what the papers said anyway.”

“It’s a funny name,” Jimmy said.

Jean found her water bottle in the kitchen, but poured herself a drink instead. Vodka. She opened the fridge for some juice and some ice, left it open, standing for a moment in the cool wedge of white light.

“What was Bill Danko’s story?” Jimmy said.

“He was teaching her to fly,” she said.

She came back out onto the deck with her vodka and cranberry juice.

“I know, it’s a bad joke.” She watched the line of jumbo jets descending into LAX, the dimmest ones twenty miles out, almost to the desert, it was that clear.

“A couple weeks before the murders, he was arrested for ‘drunken flying. ’ A police helicopter caught them strafing the house, looping around. The cops followed them back to Clover Field. My